Chalk Radio

Learn about Python, growth mindset, and the uses of rubber ducks in this interview with MIT lecturer Ana Bell. Dr. Bell, who has been programming since she was twelve and now teaches popular introduc…

In this the first of two pilot episodes of Chalk Radio with VIDEO, Professor Andrew Lo, who teaches finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, knows that many people find financial matters perplexi…

Sujood Khalid Eldouma recently relocated to the UK for her master’s studies, having previously lived in Egypt after fleeing her native Sudan to escape the devastating civil war in that country. Sujoo…

They say every crisis also presents an opportunity. Open learner Jerry Vance Anguzu seized one such opportunity in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when his native country of Uganda went into lock…

Our guest for this episode, Lotfullah Andishmand, grew up in a village in rural Afghanistan where there was no internet access or electric lights. (He describes having had to navigate by moonlight to…

When Nader AlEtaywi was in high school in Jordan, he had a passion for finance but his prospects seemed limited. Juggling his studies, minimum-wage jobs, and family crises made it hard to envision a …

Jae-Min Hong, our guest for this episode, is a hungry learner with wide-ranging curiosity and a distrust of groupthink. A native of South Korea, she has been fluent in English from childhood, which h…

In this inaugural episode of the Open Learners podcast, hosts Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen interview Maria Eduarda Barbosa, a medical student located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Maria…

Emmanuel Kasigazi is a data scientist from Kampala, Uganda. Michael Jordan Pilgreen is a financial technology engineer from Memphis, Tennessee. Kasigazi and Pilgreen know firsthand how transformative…

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation about poetry: what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters. Our guest, poet (and poetry professor) Joshua Bennett, talks about the early exper…

Our guest for this episode, Professor Rebecca Saxe, is MIT’s Associate Dean of Science. Prof. Saxe is also the principal investigator for her own laboratory, the Saxe Lab, where she deploys powerful …

As MIT’s Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning, Christopher Capozzola’s job is to look forward, identifying new opportunities and facing new challenges in online and digital learning. But he’s also…

Professor Hal Abelson has been active in computer science for over half a century—the first computer he worked with, in high school, was the kind where programs were encoded in a pattern of holes pun…

In a departure from our usual format, in which we interview an exceptional faculty member to learn about their approach to teaching, this time we’re showcasing an exemplary piece of student work: an …

You thought Chalk Radio was a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT? Yes and no! “We don't do a lot of teaching,” says Dr. Ari Epstein, our guest for this week’s episode. Dr. Epstein is associate di…

In this episode we meet professor and Nobel laureate Esther Duflo and her colleague Dr. Sara Ellison for a discussion about economics: what it is, how it differs from sociology, how it incorporates c…

This conversation with Prof. David Kaiser, who teaches physics and the history of science at MIT, covers a vast timespan, from the beginning of the universe to the present day. Prof. Kaiser explains …

Paradoxically, urban planning professor David Hsu doesn’t consider himself a “city person,” but he has great appreciation and enthusiasm for cities as places where meaningful steps can be taken towar…

You don’t need a multibillion-dollar supercollider to detect subatomic particles. In fact, you can build a working cloud chamber—a device capable of revealing the cosmic radiation and radon decay eve…

We first interviewed Professor Michel DeGraff back in season 1; he now returns for another episode, diving deeper into issues of culture and identity. He talks about his childhood in Haiti, where he …